Meal Time by Any Other Name

Before reading on, I want all of you to understand a fundamental truth about me. I LOVE food. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about food, eating food, planning my next meal, and dreaming about food. Every time I travel I am almost as interested in where/what I am going to be able to eat as anything else I may do on the trip. If money were no object or if I were less risk averse and if I didn't have a family that I loved to see occasionally, I would love to go to culinary school and open my own restaurant. (Those are two big IFs and as a result I foresee either of those things happening anytime soon.) I don't think I can overstate how much I love food, I really don't.

With that in mind it shouldn't surprise anyone that I have recently been pondering the conventions of meal time, more specifically the names we give to our meals. I feel like breakfast, lunch, and dinner (or supper) don't really describe the world's eating habits well enough to be as entrenched as they are. I certainly don't mean to say they're not useful, I just think they're too limited for the broad usage they enjoy. Nor do I mean to imply that I have all of the answers, as a matter of fact I was hoping this post could serve as a plea for suggestions on how we can collectively improve the labels we put on our meals. My suggestions (and problem meals) follow:

• Brunch - I don't know if this is supposed to be a breakfast at lunch time, a lunch-sized breakfast, or a late-ish breakfast that serves some lunch-type foods. I like the idea of breakfast for lunch because I rarely eat breakfast early and anytime I brunch I never lunch.
  
• Brinner - I feel like this is a no brainer, breakfast served at dinner. I don't want to have to explain that I love breakfast so I made it for dinner, I just want to say I ate brinner.
• 4th Meal - Call me a sucker for marketing campaigns, but I like the idea of acknowledging that some midnight snacks aren't snacks at all, but full-on meals. (Admittedly, I am suffering from a lack of creativity on what to call a large late-night pantry raid.)
• ??? - I recently celebrated a birthday. Andrea made me an awesome banana cream pie. So awesome, in fact, that I ate a large slice of it for my breakfast. What does one call dessert for breakfast? (I feel like the hobbits may have solved this, but I'm not up on my Tolkien.)
• ??? - When I was younger, my mom took my brother, sister, and me out for banana splits in lieu of a more traditional dinner a couple of times. Not only do I have very fond memories of these excursions, I remain confused on how to adequately describe the experience. Like the pie for breakfast, I don't know what to call dessert for dinner. (On a random side note, I realized that I have been misquoting the band ABC and their classic song, "Playground". While writing the post I looked up the lyrics and realized that what I had always thought to be "I gotta break cause my mother said be home by dessert" is, in fact, "I gotta break cause my mother said be home by dizzark". The word dizzark intended to rhyme with pizzark (dark and park). Oh well.)

How about you? Are there any meals you enjoy on their own merits and feel like the pesky monikers of breakfast, lunch, or dinner don't do them justice? Any suggestions for my problem meals? Thanks in advance and bon appétit.